Monday, May 3, 2010

Big Oil's Chernobyl?

Quoting IBD Editorials(I inserted the links):

“The National Academy of Sciences reported in 2003 [actually, it was released in 2002] that more than 60% — roughly 47 million gallons — of crude released in North American waters each year comes from natural seepage from the sea floor. Only 1% comes from offshore oil and gas development.

In fact, offshore drilling can reduce this natural seepage by extracting crude and relieving geological pressure from below.

Meanwhile, other forms of energy get an environmental pass…

[snipped is a litany of documented eco-damage from so-called “Green Energy” such as Ethanol and Wind Mills]

The irony is that the nonfatal accident at Three Mile Island in 1979 and the 1986 Soviet disaster at Chernobyl conspired to deprive the U.S. of a nonpolluting form of power generation — nuclear power.

A danger exists that similar overblown fears of offshore oil production will doom the U.S. to being the Bangladesh of domestic energy production.

We need the energy, the jobs and the economic growth. Can we produce enough domestic energy from all sources safely and in sufficient quantities to achieve genuine energy independence?

Not only were there no fatalities associated with the Three Mile Island incident, there were NO CASUALTIES and NO demonstrable damage to the health of ANYBODY.

The Chernobyl incident produced 30 fatalities -- in 2008 there were 37,261 highway fatalities in the USA alone. CLEARLY automobiles are FAR more dangerous than nuclear power. So, it would make far, far, FAR more sense to immediately ban all automobiles than to ban nuclear power! Of course, neither option makes any sense at all. But, since when does anybody expect eco-nuts to apply reason or logic to their purely emotional reactions?

Similarly, this spill certainly has the POTENTIAL to do serious damage. And, that has got every hysteria mongering so-called “journalist” smelling blood and digging for gold. But, to date, the WORST damage the media can document is ONE oil soaked bird.

'The floating rig had apparently just finished cementing steel casing in place at depths exceeding 18,000 ft. The next operation was to suspend the well so that the rig could move to its next drilling location, the idea being that a rig would return to this well later in order to complete the work necessary to bring the well into production.

It is now suspected that oil and gas formation fluids got into the wellbore and were undetected until it was too late to take action. The floating drilling rig moves with the waves, currents, and winds and all of the main pressure control equipment sits on the seabed and the uppermost unmoving point is in the well. The pressure control equipment – the Blowout Preventers (BOP’s) – is controlled with redundant systems from the rig.

In the event of a serious emergency, there are multiple panic buttons to hit, and even fail-safe dead man systems will automatically be engaged when something of this proportion breaks out. In this case it is suspected that none of those were activated, which suggests that the blowout was especially swift to escalate to the surface. The glow of the flames could be seen up to 35 miles away and flames were 200 to 300 feet high'...

The new findings from the study led by Ralph Lorenz, Cassini radar team member from the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, Laurel, Md., are reported in the Jan. 29 issue of the Geophysical Research Letters.

"Titan is just covered in carbon-bearing material -- it's a giant factory of organic chemicals," said Lorenz. "This vast carbon inventory is an important window into the geology and climate history of Titan."...